


No Good

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Series: Notes from the Wizarding World [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 10:58:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 5,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fics for the Marauder generation, the generation that was up to no good, that often came to no good, and that sometimes accomplished no good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Forget Me Not (Lily)

At the end of Tinker’s Lane, in a house perhaps a bit wider than its fellows with old, clean lace curtains and a well-loved car parked right out front, lived a man with Brylcreemed red hair and a briefcase and a parcel of flowers that he loved very much.

Chief among the flowers was his wife, named for the Forget-Me-Not, and she was a champion housewife and mother, a true blossom growing up through the shabby brick all around them, bright-eyed and kind with thin wrists and knobbly knees. If there was one trouble in her life, it was that she was a bit odder than her neighbors. Her grandmother had been the lunatic of Miller’s Mile, raving and prone to strange visions, and her second-cousin had up and disappeared, spirited away by some strange force that the people of the town had christened The Dangers Of Youthful Drinking. In fact, her entire line was bizarre in the extreme, the Asguibs of Cokeworth, so named for their patriarch, who’d been discovered floating on the Derwent in a basket with a note pinned to him that read, “ _this is octavius asguib_ ,” although the writing was very hard to make out and so subsequent attempts to locate the Asguibs and reprimand them for abandoning their child came to naught. Probably the original family name hadn’t been Asguib at all. Forget-Me-Not and her descendants would never uncover the truth, so probably it was better to focus on more pressing and concrete matters.

For the delightful Petunia, tall and blonde, peeping out of windows and winding her way through the gossip circles, the most pressing matter was what people were saying about them, about the awful family madness and this awful mad family. About how their darling youngest flower could be spotted smoking near the river, plucked roughly by some dirty neighborhood boy, her stockings caked with dirt, her hair matted, carting horrible pots full of reeking liquid garbage to and fro.

And people did talk. It was terrible to see the youngest flower of Tinker’s Way behave in this fashion. It was appalling. It perhaps explained why she’d gone away to school — some criminal school, to hear her sister explain it — for clearly she could not be trusted among the good children of Tinker’s Way. She was dirt caked under nail varnish, that one. She was the spirit of things suddenly disappearing and reappearing in the muddy river, of the inexplicable toad apparitions on the windowsill, of that awful spark of life in the Snape boy’s dead black eyes.

Cokeworth knew, in its solid brick heart, that Miss Lily was trouble. This concerned them. They would have preferred it if she had vanished forever, been carted up to the loony bin, snuck away with that band of troublemakers who’d shown up to greet her in Carpenter’s Corner, or perhaps flown off with The Dangers of Youthful Drinking. Goodbye, dear flower. Please forget us. We fear you.

They did not realize that somewhere far away, in a realm of criminals and visions, where the people crushed flowers into potions and lived in terror of the solid brick normalcy of Tinker’s Way, she was gaining prizes and high marks, well-liked if not always welcome, and constantly encouraged to forget Tinker’s Way, to trade stockings and schoolgirl skirts for robes and tall hats.

But she could not. She was dangerous and magical, true. But there was a happy, solid dad and a kind, thin mum; and a grey, common town in her. There were the threads of a solid family, a kind of sensible sacrificial love, which forgave you even when you were at your oddest. And it screamed out (whenever she heard that it was better to deny them, better still to be ashamed of them) a defiant and angry:  _Forget Me Not_.  _Forget Me Not_.


	2. Always (Snape)

Now Fawley — that old substitute who Slughorn, in his lazier moods, had sometimes dragged in for a guest lecture — had a daughter. And this daughter had married a Muggle, and Fawley hadn’t even said anything to her about it, hadn’t cast her out or cursed the child that resulted from her union, hadn’t fought this erosion of the blood, this insult to Mr. Nott’s social statics. For this Fawley had to pay. So he was lured out under pretense of a party, with an untraceable letter doused in Mrs. Malfoy’s perfume (curious, Dark, the base of which was jasmine grown in starlight, the better to make wizards feel as though they could never refuse her) and charmed to disappear as soon as he’d read it, charmed by the careful hand of Mrs. Malfoy’s elder sister.

And there was another unexpected guest at the party, a repellent person, a person with glittering black eyes and one Muggle parent, who seemed not to have been reared in starlight, but rather to have clawed his way in by fits and starts. And everyone thought it would be very funny if it should be he that made Fawley pay. Even he thought it would be very funny.

This was a surprise to Fawley, who remembered him as scowling, studious, hunched over a cauldron, usually the butt of the joke. Fawley had noted the sallow hand waving impatiently in the air during lectures; had seen the furious corrections to that old windbag, Borage; had watched the black eyes hunger after some kind of greatness, all of which seemed to promise that someday this person might learn that even the very delightful things in life, such as parties and starlight, might be tossed over for something bigger.

Fawley had seen potential. Not good, you understand. Not yet. But potential.

"I don’t fear this," Fawley told him, "I will continue to love my daughter; she’ll know that I loved her, because I do not renounce her. She’ll see this as a kind of greatness, even. But you? Once you do this, you cannot undo it. Whatever you might become, it will be marred by this. You will be marred by this."

But Snape did not listen to him. Snape had great potential for evil as well as for good. And so whatever he would make of himself, whatever he might reach for and claw after in the coming years, it would always be marred by this. Always.


	3. Greenhouse (Frank & Alice)

Frank and Alice were not Madam Puddifooters, prone to snogging by the Quidditch stands or inclined to gallivant about Hogsmeade showing each other off. They were focused and clear-headed and intense, and when they met it was with a purpose. Prefects’ meetings, and the brisk walks to and from them. Trainee sessions in the dueling hall, later on. And occasional moments in Alice’s greenhouse, where naturally they were there to prune mandrakes and harvest healing herbs and where easy, direct conversation would have to stand in for flirting, because they were both far too firm and honest and open to be effective flirts.

Now no one has been in Alice’s greenhouse for an age. It is not the sort of place Augusta is inclined to keep up, and the key has been lost and the windows are broken. The air is now murky with a heavy, decayed, wild scent, and the spare flowerpots have been smashed by some unknown hand. The plants have either shriveled up and died, or else they have grown over each-other in a demented fashion: coils of ivy choke the life out of the begonias, unsettled thorny things prick each flitterbloom leaf, and strange bits of greenery spill out over the floor, emitting a heavy perfume to make intruders delirious. Nothing that Frank and Alice planted stands firm anymore; nothing seems to have grown healthy without their patient attention.

Except for one thing. But you already know his story.


	4. Secrets (Lily)

There are some secrets Order members have taken to the grave, and one of these is the tremendous defeat in broad daylight of three Death Eaters in Brighton on 19th September, 1978. They had descended on a crowd of Muggle holiday goers and were somehow utterly routed, a strange result given that Auror investigations revealed no other magic-users in the vicinity.

In all likelihood, it was someone hiding in plain sight. Someone quite used to Muggle locations and strange Muggle devices. Someone quite used to being put down and dismissed for Muggle expressions. Someone who understood, intimately, that wizards and witches tended to ignore or belittle or underestimate people wearing Muggle clothes, people with Muggle handbags and silly Muggle spectacles (and their wands ready but out-of-sight, not that a preening pure-blood supremacist would know it), people with Muggle blood.

"And with any luck," thought Lily Evans to herself, on that bright seafront in 1978, "That arrogance is exactly what will do Voldemort’s lot in."


	5. Head Boy (James)

You remember the Head Boy, don’t you?

It’s hard to forget. Remember the boasts? The mocking laughter? The quickness he had, always quick to point out he was quicker than you? The pranks? Those friends of his egging him on? Remember how they jinxed you the day after the Quidditch match? Remember how lively and fortunate he was, how he had everything, while you seemed to have nothing, or at least so much less than he had?

I’ll bet you remember. But would it make a difference to you if I said he never would have done any of that,  _none of it_ , if he’d known what you might tell his son? Isn’t that important?

"Important?" you say, "Not at all." The important thing to remember about the Head Boy is his arrogance, after all. How he had everything. How fortunate and mocking he was. His son, sitting in front of you, may not know about that, but then it’s up to you to tell him, isn’t it? It’s up to you to crush the memory of the Head Boy. Because it would  _serve him right_.

But the person in front of you is not arrogant. This person in front of you has been friendless, hasn’t he? You remember what happened in that year before the Battle, when he didn’t have much (when he had nothing, really). And you know the person sitting in front of you hasn’t been fortunate; you know he’s been downright Undesirable. And so you keep on remembering. You remember how Potter faced down other bullies, bullies bigger than him. You remember how he spoke up. The time you saw him in Diagon with his baby, and it looked like the child was his whole world. You remember how he fought. You remember opening the  _Prophet_ on November 1st and there he was under the headline, crumpled and broken and alone, with his wife rotting somewhere in the upstairs of in their ruined house.

You remember. You hate him, but you remember. And it isn’t Harry Potter’s fault that you hate him. So you answer, “Your dad was Head Boy for our year. I remember. And I remember he gave up everything. A real hero, your dad.”

And when you’re far from here it will occur to you that you haven’t lied. You could have said that he had everything, and you could have said that having everything made him a bully. But he gave up everything too, didn’t he? He gave up everything in the end.

So it turns out that you said the important thing. The thing worth remembering.


	6. Good Years (Bertha & Peter)

When Bertha Jorkins graduated and took a post at the Ministry, the very worst of the war had not yet arrived and those merry politicians were still celebrating publicly, not at all afraid that any upstart Dark wizards might cast a serious shadow on such a fun-having and senseless government. They still held the annual Ministry ball back then, a delightful night of glamour and gossip. They still sat for magical photographs in dress robes bursting at the seams, bedecked with jewels taken from unwise, Muggle-artifact-keeping blood-traitors in Auror raids and auctioned off for half of what they were worth. And they still paraded about Diagon after dark, creeping from watering hole to watering hole, sinking lower and lower by degrees, until they were all in Knockturn at midnight with a lapful of some engaging being of indeterminate heritage.

Those were, as they say, the good years. Bertha enjoyed herself along with the rest of them, and occasionally sent signed photographs back to persons still at Hogwarts: old friends, old rivals, and even that round, agreeable little fellow who she’d always secretly fancied.

_You really must come work at the Ministry when you’re out because it is such fun! I know you think you won’t have the N.E.W.T.s and your friends are smarter, but really they are all so arrogant and always making trouble, and they don’t say the right things, which I think you will, not being full of yourself, always so supportive of everyone._

_By the way, why DO they call you Wormtail?_

_Such love,_  
 _Bertha._


	7. For Enemies (Lily & Snape)

The truth was that she had found the textbook tucked into her bag by accident a few months before O.W.L.s, and she noted his scribbles at first with a kind of fondness that she had begun to think she couldn’t feel anymore, because he’d changed so much over the past five years. But she was fond of him. He was very clever, really, even if it was caustic cleverness. But then she came across the spidery inscription, and paused, and sat and thought and told herself that she was not being kind. She was thinking the worst of him. As though he were an enemy, just because of his scribbles and his hobbies and the color of his tie, and that was a thing she had always been careful not to think.

So she returned the book, saying, “I must have thought it was mine by accident,” and that was that.

Except that it wasn’t. They fell apart soon after. And she didn’t want anyone to think that it wasn’t because he’d said what he did. That word? That was enough to break it off. That was why.

But if she’d really wanted to think the worst of him, she could have had other reasons. Reasons like what they’d done to Mary, and how he’d lied when she confronted him about it, said, “ _Of course_  I’ve never heard that spell before,” and then a hissed, furious, “I thought you said you  _didn’t_  look through my book!”

Reasons like the Death Eaters who came after, who knew clever new spells, caustic spells that could slice you up like potions ingredients, because you were an enemy. She thought of him then.

Sectumsempra. For enemies.


	8. Disaffected (Mulciber & Avery & Alecto & Rowle)

"Disaffected?" Avery said one day, peering over his sunglasses, "What rot. Rowle, did you hear? They’re calling us  _disaffected_.”

Rowle, the one with the sun-bleached hair, laughed at this. He could never be bothered to read the papers, but he believed Avery. He was a believing person, Rowle.

"Shows how much they know. We’ve nothing to be disaffected about," said Mulciber easily, "Disaffected is Muggle-born dropouts—"

"How nice that they should drop out," said Alecto, wriggling her ankles in her too-small summer shoes, "How right."

"Goblin potion pushers and thieves, centaurs full of rebellion, filthy foreign hags peddling  _dirt—”_

"Your brother gave you that nice new broomstick for the one you chased away—MacDonald, was it? Remember?" said Alecto.

"Crashed it. Rubbish thing. My latest is loads better," said Mulciber, "Because I’m not disaffected. Not a one of us is disaffected. We’re the keepers of order; that’s what we are. We’re not some pack of malcontents, not here to rebel against what’s right and proper—"

"Snape’s disaffected," said Avery, "A bit."

"Disgusting, more like," said Alecto, "An aberration."

"Snape? Who went and made Snape mascot?" said Rowle.

"We’re the ones chosen to keep this world on its path," said Mulciber, "On the only path. We’re not the ones dragging in the stink of Muggles, eroding away all that’s glorious, all the might of the ages. To call us disaffected is to dismiss us and that—"

He brought up one tanned hand ominously, used the other to adjust his fashionable brimmed cap. Very much an orator in this moment, their Mulciber. Not at all a pampered younger son on holiday.

“ _That_  would be a very bad idea.”

"You’re blocking my sun," Alecto said petulantly.


	9. Ministry Man (Dirk)

Dirk Cresswell was not thin, exactly. It was more that he gave the impression of never eating more than his allotted portion, and perhaps even letting others taste, if they were the sort to never have enough. He was clean. His eyes were guileless, pale brown, beneath inoffensive brows and a high child’s forehead. He was in five minutes before he had to be, every day, tap tap tap, very regular, so that the Watchwizards knew before he came into sight, “Oh! That’s Cresswell. Model Ministry man, he is. A model wizard.”

And he was. He was so neat he seemed to repel filth. Wizards with grubby wand hands would wipe them anxiously on their robes before offering them to Cresswell, apologetic despite themselves, not sure how such a sanitary creature could possibly help them out of this next dirty mess with the goblins. And the goblins themselves trusted him — no small feat — because Cresswell did not appear to be some outlandish magical pretender, not some high-flown mage in purple silks spitting curses; or some angular, insecure pureblood with a snake around his throat and Dark artifacts in his vaults. No, Cresswell was better than that. He was a beautiful, fantastical businessman. A new kind of wizard. Stainless, with skin very clear and even, with nails polished so that they shone like celluloid, he was reasonable and trim and bright.

(Very bright. A protege of Mr. Slughorn’s, in fact.)

And so few realized that beneath Cresswell’s unsullied, unromantic exterior there beat a heart full of fancy. That he saw in the goblins something more incredible than most did, a people plucked from his dearest childhood reveries, creatures of story, beings to be respectful with. That he saw in the Ministry a great broken castle of competing visions, ruled by capricious and cruel fairy children, who’d never been out in the clean and sanitary Muggle world and who therefore could not appreciate what they had, but oh! What they had could be  _great_. To Cresswell, his fellows were extravagant, silly, full of insubstantial whims — but how lucky he was. How lucky to be counted among them. How at home he felt, though he retained an aura of sanitized, orderly Muggle life. And how great they could be — he and the Ministry, together — if only magical disorder could stretch to accommodate someone like Dirk Cresswell.

(“It’s all a fad, this might and order business,” he’d told a fellow Slug Club member once. “Why, the whole wizarding world’s nothing but disorder. Nothing but lots of different types all coming together in beautiful chaos. It’s grand, it is. And why would they want to lose it? These are the least properly magical ideas I’ve ever heard, all this You-Know-Who stuff.”

"Tell  _them_  that,” the Head Girl had said.)

But when the era of might and order came, people forgot everything they knew about Dirk Cresswell. They began to suspect that he was taking more than was allotted to his kind. They whispered that he, with his polished shoes and celluloid nails, was smuggling in filth. 

"That’s Cresswell," they said, convinced that they themselves were the modern model, a clean and an orderly bunch, the vanguard of magical might. "I hear he’s not a wizard at all."


	10. Obituary (Lily)

_an obituary they didn’t run in this morning’s Prophet_  
 _(they didn’t have to say it)_

Our former Head Girl! How pretty, how well-liked, how kind. What an easy life she had. Forever in the sun. An endless supply of friends. Every advantage heaped on her, save, perhaps, that small and crucial matter of her blood. But no matter. She rose above it.

Rather insolently, we think. Consider who she married. Consider who she did not. Consider how, no matter how kind she was, she was forever leaving people behind in the dust — sisters and former friends and so on. Surely she owed these people some extra, special kindness. Surely she owed the world more than she put into it.

Because we hate people like our perfect, sunny former Head Girl, secretly. Don’t we?

We suspect they aren’t as good as they were made out to be. Never mind that it is often we ourselves who make them out to be so, who invite them to secret clubs and put them on display and boast of their powers and publish glowing pieces on the  _Prophet_  on what they are wearing and who they’ve married and how much money they’ve married into. Never mind that. We only do it to take them down, after all. See her rise above her blood! Now see what fate we’ve planned for her. And here — let us focus on the chronicle of bitter people who couldn’t be as kind as she was, and let us paint it as her failure. Here is a Madonna who did not live up to her own goodness. As useless as a Muggle religious icon, really. We knew she didn’t deserve all that sun and light.

Yes. Our former Head Girl. The girl with everything.

Pictured here on this fine morning, the 2nd of November, 1981.


	11. The Game (James & Alice & Walden & Evan)

There was a garden on a sunny slope, an Eden enchanted to never run too wild or dangerous, and there doting wizards and witches from the neighboring environs would occasionally bring their children. And to the garden came one day an adored lad from sunny Godric’s Hollow; and a venturesome young scion from hidden, well-warded Golgorand; and a stubborn young demoiselle from mostly-Muggle Penzance; and a clever stripling raised in Tintagel’s magical library. They met well out of sight of their parents. And within moments they conceived a brilliant game — all make believe and no dullness, thrilling as Quidditch and as wonderfully disgusting as gobstones, the greatest game ever played in the garden, a game in which one could be anything and could do anything: a game requiring equal parts courage, cunning, loyalty, and intelligence.

The game was so tremendously fun that it would keep them pestering Mum and Dad for years after. “Oh, can we go back? Can we go back there, please?”

Because the game took hold of them, and it stood for fun and for friendship. They would remember it later and, though not quite sure of certain names or faces or the more arbitrary rules one of the others had absolutely insisted on, what they recalled best was bright and happy childhood. They remembered the terribly serious delight of destroying imaginary monsters, safe in the garden with those three they had sworn eternal friendship to.

But then James Sorted Gryffindor, and Evan Slytherin, and stubborn Alice chose Hufflepuff, and young Walden — forever an oddball, fascinated by things like the history of sacrifice and esoteric execution rituals — stalled and went for Ravenclaw. So by four different roads they left the garden to meet monsters of the real sort.

And from the moment their roads diverged they could never again capture the game.


	12. Beata (Snape)

It was not  _her_ , you understand. Without the aid of the Pensieve, without a certain boy’s eyes as a reminder, he would have been unable to cobble together even what she’d looked like. He would have woken in the night, shivering and furious, and clawed through old trunks and ripped apart photo albums to determine if she’d been snub-nosed and daring, holding an untested potion aloft, or perhaps prim and studious, as obsessed with books as the Granger girl.

Both? Or neither.

It didn’t matter. The truth was, he hadn’t really listened or paid attention when he’d had her in front of him; he’d never bothered with understanding her. His memories, insubstantial and silvery, revealed someone in bits and pieces, only those slivers of her that had come in useful when he’d been constructing himself. Here she was showing him kindness. Here she was spurning him, crafting for him his worst memory. Here she was in relation to  _him_. Never as herself. Even he, selfish as he was, finally came to understand the unfairness inherent in that.

She’d surely been greater than the brew in the Pensieve. She’d surely been a person, once. But he had long ago lost sight of that person, if in fact he’d ever had it, and he was left grasping after a chimerical Beatrice — part friend, part enemy’s wife, part sacrifice, but nothing real. The real one was the one he had no right to know.

As he died, he could pretend that it was her, but that was because he had always been pretending, had always seized for himself the parts of her that he needed. Here was courage, embodied in the beloved dead girl. Here was spite, in the former friend who’d turned him away. Here was envy, sprung from the kiss in her mouth, the nightmare in which it was pressed to James Potter’s heart. But these were not enough to make a living, breathing woman. They were only shades he’d brewed up for himself.

In the end, he was not just brave, not just spiteful. He was sorry as well. He hoped that didn’t come from her. He had used her and sliced her up and mixed her into a kind of silvery regret potion. Like she had never been a person at all. So she had no reason to be sorry.

He did.


	13. Order Members (James & Caradoc)

Potter and Dearborn. Each is his own perfect cover. Potter is secure, powerful, quick, often-laughing, moneyed, never looks too moneyed; Dearborn is wry, a bit louche, very theatrical, too gallant for his own good, has let at least six family fortunes slip through his fingers. Both pure-bloods. Likely to hail each other at parties. Never give a sign that they even know a war is on. Never let it show. Their eyes pass over even Lucius Malfoy when they come across him in Diagon. Like he doesn’t even exist. They exchange looks, amused, over the head of little Fudge the Ministry stooge, as they say, “Order of the what? The Phoenix? Come off it. Who would waste their time with something like that?”

But last night they struck down a former classmate, saw the grinning skull mask slip off to reveal some old know-it-all from Astronomy class, pushed back the black robes to show the Mark on his skinny wrist. And this morning’s Prophet has the details, sketched out so neatly for the world to see, like a star chart, pointing the way to a future neither Potter nor Dearborn wants to take part in.

So Dearborn looks like he hasn’t slept, and will look that way until he vanishes to his eternal rest. And Potter says the new lines on his face are laugh lines. But they are not laugh lines.

The war creeps in around the edges. Even for them.


	14. Trapped (Snape)

"It goes without saying that he was a master of the mind. This cliche term is one we affix to nearly everyone who successfully manages the business of Occlumency and Legilimency, and in his case he turned these arts on the very creature that first introduced them to him — no small feat.

"But what does that  _mean:_  to master the mind? Does it make one a champion of rational thought? Does it allow one to understand every spark of emotion, every odd flicker which can light up a temperament with the electrical awakening of the synapses? I think in some ways the mind, that great, dark engine crammed inside our paltry craniums, is not meant to be mastered. Certainly not if he was the result of such an endeavor. 

"Consider this: he had one of the most coveted positions in our world, where Hogwarts — particularly Hogwarts under Albus Dumbledore — is as prestigious as the Ministry, as Gringotts. He was, for someone in such a role, surprisingly young. He had very clever colleagues, if few friends, and he lived in an area that, while to magical eyes was crumbling and ordinary and ugly, very Muggle, to Muggle eyes was ripe for gentrification, for promise, for new blood to come in search of cheap housing. Within three years of his death, it was a revitalized town, and before then it was an artist’s paradise, a place for free thinkers, a place that might have suited him if he’d let it.

"For he was a free thinker, in his way. An intellectual. For all his flaws, he must have had a massive brain. His articles are brilliant, even by the standards of today, and, with Dumbledore’s backing, they were always published straightaway. He had the backing, too, of several very prominent names who regarded him as the cleverest among them, as a survivor, as one who slipped away from punishment; and who ought to have been commended for it. He had the support of Lucius Malfoy, of Yaxley and Baddock, and in those days that meant quite a bit.

"But I say this as one who knew him: he was a  _miserable_  man. If he was brilliant, then it sparked frustration and cruelty when his students were not. If he was admired for escaping Azkaban, then it meant nothing to him; and if he was derided for it by some, then surely the derision grew in his mind and dominated his thoughts. He never forgot a slight. If he ever longed for forgiveness, then probably it was because he could not comprehend receiving it. He had Occluded against it, blocked his mind so that he himself could not forgive.

"One wonders if he looked at the walls of his reclaimed Northern town, and saw, despite some very real successes even at a very young age, there written a story of failure, of living and dying without any growth whatsoever, frustrated.

"Skeeter paints him as a romantic and intellectual hero, cruel only for the Cause, and cruel only in the way spurned lovers are, who still somehow deliberately thought out every action and methodically brought us to victory. I think he did have good qualities — he must have; most do. I think he did help us on our way to victory.

"I also think he was trapped inside his mind. It made him horrible."  

\- Hermione Granger, Senior Undersecretary to the Department of Mysteries, on Order spy Severus Snape


	15. Time Enough (Lily/James)

The wedding was a hasty decision.  
  
"Well, if you  _insist_  on making an honest woman of me—”  
"I do. Aren’t I honorable? Haven’t I always been the perfect picture of chivalry?"  
"I’m not going to answer that."  
  
And she declined to use his overflowing Gringotts vault, his fine family jewels, his mother’s veil and tiara. A bit overwrought and very Pure-blood, so no thanks. But perhaps some kitschy jewels fit for a glam rocker (50p at the Cokeworth secondhand shop), her mother’s old fifties cocktail dress, hair thrown up in a careless Northern girl’s updo. And wouldn’t you know it, but she  _still_  looked beautiful. He was rendered speechless, but obviously not for long. He was never speechless for long. He opened his mouth to declare undying love.  
  
And she said, “Oh, do shut up, Potter. There’ll be time enough for  _that_.”


	16. The End (Lily, James, Peter, Remus, Sirius)

All life progresses like a stair — not simply in the sense that it must continue on, on, on, inevitably winding its way through both dread and delight, until it should come to the landing, the Great Event, that abrupt  _stop_  — but also because stairs, like lives, are formed over time by a great deal of trampling and stomping, by endless patterns of feet that leave first brief impressions and then tremendous grooves in the body, warping the woodwork as they pitter onwards or downwards, carelessly depositing scuffmarks.

Take this stair.

First came the solid tread of the wizard who built the house, and whose arms carved the thing, and next came his bride, with a very light step, a deathly fixed step, never a step out of place. Their descendants followed, too, and by and large the family seemed to possess a steady and powerful foot, a way of always selecting the same spots, and wearing down, bit by bit, the same areas on the landing.

One descendant chanced to bring home some friends, and these marked the stair in a different manner: the youngest of the lot had a creeping step, and a manner of lingering around the bend of the thing, sweaty hands clutching the panels on the wall, as though listening for secrets that were not his own. And the skinniest friend had an unsure foot; he would come up a few steps, as though longing to join in the merriment upstairs, and then think better of it, retreat back to the hall, and wait to be called — in this way, he carved out some small impression on the lower steps, but never quite enough to mar the stair, and indeed on the upper step he left no impressions at all. Another was a Bounder by nature, those beings which joyously skip up two or three at a time, eager to reach the top, thoughtlessly scraping the rich wood with dragonhide boots, only to descend rapidly and boyishly and sometimes even painfully back down, via the banister. And still another — she admired the stair, rubbed at the spindly posts on the landing with the edge of her jumper until they shone, stopped to chat with the pictures of great ancestors, gently clutched Baby around his middle and lifted him up each step one by one, with his soft toes brushing the floor every time, so that he giggled and chortled with delight.

The last step to meet the stair was a very sure one, a hard and terrible step, quite different from those which had come before. It gouged a hole on the landing with a heel; not in anger, really, but more because it belonged to a tall and powerful being who knew he could step as cruelly as he liked. The stepper traced one portrait with a cold white finger and made her scream; this amused him. He mockingly let one hand glide along the banister. This left no impression. He was not sweating and nervous. On the second landing, he met with another stepper, this one coming downward. And he helped this second person get down faster still, left the fellow crumpled at the bottom, with the ancestral portraits screaming murder at the sight. 

And then he kept going, eager to pass up, up, up; seeing in his mind’s eye his stair, his life, as something grand that could never come to a stop; but it did, it would, he would reach the end of it, for no stair is eternal, though he was completely certain his would be.

Lily and Baby, in the nursery on the uppermost landing, disavowed him of that notion.


End file.
